"Frankenstein's Fallen Angel"

Joyce Carol Oates

Critical Inquiry, 10 (1984), 543-54

{543}

"Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind
sinned against me?" [Walton
15]

-- FRANKENSTEIN'S DEMON

Quite apart from its enduring celebrity, and its proliferation
in numberless extraliterary forms, Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a remarkable
work. A novel sui generis, if a novel at all, it is a
unique blending of Gothic,
fabulist, allegorical, and philosophical materials. Though
certainly one of the most calculated and willed of
fantasies, being in large part a kind of gloss upon or rejoinder
to John Milton's Paradise Lost,
Frankenstein is fueled by the kind of grotesque, faintly
absurd, and wildly inventive images that spring direct from the
unconscious: the eight-foot creature designed to be "beautiful,"
who turns out almost indescribably repulsive (yellow-skinned,
shriveled of countenance, with straight black lips and
near-colorless eyes); the cherished cousin-bride who is
beautiful but, in the mind's dreaming, yields horrors ("As I
imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the
hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought
that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud
enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the
folds" [1.4.2]); the mad
dream of the Arctic as a country of "eternal light" [Letter 1.2] that will prove, of
course, only a place of endless ice, the appropriate landscape
for Victor Frankenstein's death and his demon's
self-immolation.

{544} Central to Frankenstein -- as it is central to a
vastly different nineteenth-century romance, Jane Eyre --
is a stroke of lightning that appears to issue in a dazzling
"stream of fire" from a beautiful old oak tree ("So soon the
light vanished. the oak had disappeared. and nothing remained
but a blasted stump" [1.1.9]): the literal stimulus
for Frankenstein's subsequent discovery of the cause of
generation and life. And according to Mary Shelley's prefatory
account of the origin of her "ghost story," the very image of
Frankenstein and his demon-creature sprang from a waking dream
of extraordinary vividness:

I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination,
unbidden possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images
that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual
bound of reverie. I saw -- with shut eyes, but acute mental
vision -- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling
beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm
of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some
powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy,
half-vital motion.
. . . The student sleeps: but he is awakened; he opens his eyes:
behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his
curtains. and looking on him with yellow, watery, but
speculative eyes. [Introduction
10]

Hallucinatory and surrealist on its deepest level,
Frankenstein is of course one of the most
self-consciously literary "novels" ever written: its awkward
form is the epistolary Gothic; its lyric descriptions of natural
scenes (the grandiose Valley of Chamounix in particular)
spring from Romantic sources; its speeches and monologues echo
both Shakespeare and Milton; and, should the
author's didactic intention not be clear enough, the
demon-creature educates himself by studying three books of
symbolic significance -- Goethe's Sorrows of Young
Werther, Plutarch's Lives, and Milton's Paradise Lost. (The last
conveniently supplies him with a sense of his own predicament,
as Mary Shelley hopes to dramatize it. He reads Milton's great
epic as if it were a "true history" giving the picture of an
omnipotent God warring with His creatures; he identifies himself
with Adam, except so far as Adam had come forth from God a
"perfect creature, happy and prosperous [2.7.4]." Finally, of course, he
identifies with Satan: "I am thy creature: I ought to be thy
Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from
joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone
am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and {545} good;
misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be
virtuous." [2.2.5])

The search of medieval alchemists for the legendary
philosophers' stone (the talismanic process by which base metals
might be transformed into gold or, in psychological terms, the
means by which the individual might realize his destiny), Faust's reckless defiance of
human limitations and his willingness to barter his soul for
knowledge, the fatal search of such tragic figures as Oedipus
and Hamlet for answers to the mysteries of their lives -- these
are the archetypal dramas to which Frankenstein bears an
obvious kinship. Yet, as one reads, as Frankenstein and his
despised shadow-self
engage in one after another of the novel's many dialogues, it
begins to seem as if the nineteen-year-old author is discovering
these archetypal elements for the first time. Frankenstein "is"
a demonic parody (or extension) of Milton's God; he "is" Prometheus
plasticator, the creator of mankind; but at the same
time, by his own account, he is totally unable to control the
behavior of his demon (variously called "monster," "fiend,"
"wretch," but necessarily lacking a name). Surprisingly. it is
not by way of the priggish and "self-devoted" [Walton 12] young scientist that
Mary Shelley discovers the great power of her narrative but by
way of the misshapen demon, with whom most readers identify:
"My person was hideous, and my stature gigantic: What did this
mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my
destination?" [2.7.2]. It is
not simply the case that the demon like Satan and Adam in Paradise Lost
has the most compelling speeches in the novel and is far wiser
and more magnanimous than his creator: he is also the means by
which a transcendent love -- a romantically unrequited
love -- is expressed. Surely one of the secrets of
Frankenstein, which helps to account for its abiding
appeal, is the demon's patient, unquestioning, utterly faithful,
and utterly human love for his irresponsible creator.

When Frankenstein is tracking the demon into the Arctic regions
for instance, it is clearly the demon who is helping him in his
search, and even leaving food for him; but Frankenstein is so
blind -- in fact so comically blind -- he believes that
"spirits" are responsible. "Yet still a spirit of good followed
and directed my steps, and, when I most murmured, would suddenly
extricate me from seemingly insurmountable difficulties.
Sometimes, when nature, overcome by hunger, sunk under the
exhaustion, a repast was prepared for me in the desert, that
restored and inspirited me. . . . I may not doubt that
it was set there by the spirits that I had invoked to aid me"
[3.7.3].

By degrees, with the progression of the fable's unlikely plot.
the inhuman creation becomes increasingly human while his
creator becomes increasingly inhuman, frozen in a posture of
rigorous denial. (He is blameless of any wrongdoing in
terms of the demon and even dares to tell Walton, literally with
his dying breath, that another scientist might succeed where he
had failed! -- the lesson of the "Frankenstein monster" {546}
is revealed as totally lost on Frankenstein himself.) The demon
is (sub)human consciousness-in-the-making, naturally benevolent
as Milton's Satan is not, and received with horror and contempt
solely because of his physical appearance. He is sired without a
mother in defiance of nature, but he is in one sense an infant
-- a comically monstrous eight-foot baby -- whose progenitor
rejects him immediately after creating him, in one of the most
curious (and dreamlike) scenes in the novel:

"How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how
delineate the wretch whom, with such infinite pains and care, I
had endeavored to for? . . . I had worked hard for
nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an
inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and
health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded
moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream
vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed
out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my
bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep." [1.4.1]

Here follows the nightmare vision of Frankenstein's bride-to-be,
Elizabeth, as a form of his dead mother, with "grave-worms
crawling" [1.4.2] in her
shroud; and shortly afterward the "wretch" himself appears at
Frankenstein s bed, drawing away the canopy as Mary Shelley had
imagined. But Frankenstein is so cowardly he runs away again;
and this time the demon is indeed abandoned, to reappear only
after the first of the "murders" of Frankenstein's kin. On the
surface, Frankenstein's behavior is preposterous, even idiotic,
for he seems blind to the fact that is apparent to any reader --
that he has loosed a fearful power into the world, whether it
strikes his eye as aesthetically pleasing or not, and he
must take responsibility for it. Except, of course, he
does not. For, as he keeps telling himself, he is blameless of
any wrongdoing apart from the act of creation itself. The
emotions he catalogs for us -- gloom, sorrow, misery, despair --
are conventionally Romantic attitudes, mere luxuries in a
context that requires action and not simply
response.

By contrast the demon is all activity, all yearning, all hope.
His love for his maker is unrequited and seems incapable of
making any impression upon Frankenstein; yet the demon never
gives it up, even when he sounds most threatening: "Beware,"
says the demon midway in the novel, "for I am fearless, and
therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake,
that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the
injuries you inflict" [3.3.4]. His voice is very like
his creator's -- indeed, everyone in Frankenstein sounds
alike -- but his posture is always one of simple need: he
requires love in order to become less monstrous, but, as he
is a monster, love is denied him; and the man responsible
for this comically tragic state of affairs says repeatedly that
he is not to blame. Frankenstein's typical response to the
situation is: "I felt as if I had committed some {547} great
crime, the consciousness of which haunted me. I was guiltless,
but I had indeed drawn a horrible curse upon my head, as mortal
as that of crime" [3.2.5].
But if Frankenstein is not to blame for the various deaths that
occur, who is? Had he endowed his creation, as God endowed Adam
in Milton's epic, with free will? Or is the demon
psychologically his creature, committing the forbidden acts
Frankenstein wants committed? -- so long as Frankenstein himself
remains "guiltless" [3.2.5].

It is a measure of the subtlety of this moral parable that the
demon strikes so many archetypal chords and suggests so many
variant readings. He recapitulates in truncated form the
history of consciousness of his race (learning to speak, read,
write, etc., by closely watching the De Lacey family); he is an
abandoned child, a parentless orphan; he takes on the voices of
Adam, Satan: (Evil thenceforth
became my good" [Walton 14],
he says, as Milton's fallen angel says, "Evil be thou my good"),
even our "first mother," Eve. When the demon terrifies
himself by seeing his reflection in a pool, and grasping at once
the nature of his own deformity, he is surely not mirroring
Narcissus, as some commentators have suggested, but Milton's Eve
in her surprised discovery of her own beauty, in book 4 of
Paradise Lost:

I thither
went
With unexperienc't thought, and laid me down
On the green bank, to look into the clear
Smooth Lake, that to me seem'd another Sky.
As I bent down to look, just opposite,
A Shape within the wat'ry gleam appear'd
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleas'd I soon return'd,
Pleas'd it return'd as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love; there I had fixt
Mine eyes till now, and pin'd with vain desire [ll. 456-66]1

He is Shakespeare's Edmund, though unloved -- a shadow
figure more tragic, because more "conscious," than the hero he
represents. Most suggestively, he has become by the novel's
melodramatic conclusion a form of Christ: sinned against by all
humankind, yet fundamentally blameless, and yet quite willing to
die as a sacrifice. He speaks of his death as a "consummation";
he is going to burn himself on a funeral pyre somewhere in the
Arctic wastes -- unlikely, certainly, but a fitting end to a
life conceived by way of lightning and electricity:

"But soon," he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, "I shall
die. and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning
miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile
triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames.
The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be
swept into the sea by the {548} winds. My spirit will sleep in
peace; or, if it thinks, it will not surely think thus." [Walton 17]

But the demon does not die within the confines of the novel, so
perhaps he has not died after all. He is, in the end, a "modern"
species of shadow or Doppelgänger -- the nightmare that
is deliberately created by man's ingenuity and not a mere
supernatural being or fairy-tale remnant.

* * *

Frankenstein's double significance as a work of prose
fiction and a cultural myth -- as "novel" of 1818 and timeless
"metaphor" -- makes it a highly difficult story to read
directly. A number of popular misconceptions obscure it for
most readers: Frankenstein is of course not the monster,
but his creator; nor is he a mad scientist of genius -- he is in
fact a highly idealistic and naive youth in the conventional
Romantic mode (in Walton's admiring eyes, "noble," "cultivated,"
a "celestial spirit" who has suffered "great and unparalleled
misfortunes"), not unlike Mary Shelley's fated lover Shelley. Despite the fact
that a number of catastrophes occur around him and indirectly
because of him, Victor Frankenstein is well intentioned,
gentlemanly, good. He is no sadist like H. G. Wells'
exiled vivisectionist Dr. Moreau, who boasts: "You cannot
imagine the strange colorless delight of these intellectual
desires. The thing before you is no longer an animal, a
fellow-creature, but a problem."2 Frankenstein's mission, on the
other hand, is selfless, even messianic:

"No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me
onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success.
Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first
break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
A new species would bless me as its creator and source: many
happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No
father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I
should deserve theirs. . . . If I could bestow
animation upon lifeless matter, I might in the process of time
. . . renew life where death had apparently devoted
the body to corruption." [1.3.6]

It is a measure of the novel's extraordinary fame that the very
name "Frankenstein" has long since supplanted "Prometheus" in popular
usage; and the Frankenstein legend retains a significance for
our time as the Prometheus legend does not.

How many fictional characters, after all, have made the great
leap from literature to mythology? How many creations of sheer
language have stepped from the rhythms of their authors'
idiosyncratic voices into what might be called a collective
cultural consciousness? Don Quixote, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes,
Alice (in Wonderland), certain figures in the fairy tales {549}
of Hans Christian Andersen . . . and of course
Frankenstein's "monster." Virtually millions of people who have
never heard of the novel Frankenstein, let alone that a
young Englishwoman named Mary Shelley (in fact Godwin) wrote it
at the age of nineteen, are well acquainted with the image of
Frankenstein popularized by Boris
Karloff in the 1930s and understand, at least intuitively,
the ethical implications of the metaphor. (As in the
expression, particularly relevant for our time, "We have created
a Frankenstein monster.") The more potent the archetype evoked
by a work of literature, the more readily its specific form
slips free of the time-bound personal work. On the level
of cultural myth, the figures of Dracula, Sherlock Holmes,
Alice, and the rest are near-autonomous beings, linked to no
specific books and no specific authors. They have become
communal creations; they belong to us all. Hence the very real
difficulty in reading Mary Shelley's novel for the first time.
(Subsequent readings are far easier and yield greater
rewards.)

Precisely because of this extraordinary fame, one should be
reminded of how original and unique the novel was at the time of
its publication. Can it even be read at the present time in a
context hospitable to its specific allusions and assumptions --
one conversant with the thorny glories of Paradise Lost.
the sentimental ironies of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient
Mariner," the Gothic
conventions of tales-within-tales, epistolary frames, and
histrionic speeches delivered at length. In a more accomplished
work, Wuthering Heights, the structural complexities of
tales-within-tales are employed for artistic ends: the
ostensible fracturing of time yields a rich poetic significance;
characters grow and change like people whom we have come to
know. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the strained
conventions of the romance are mere structural devices to allow
Victor Frankenstein and his demon their opposing -- but
intimately linked -- "voices." Thus, abrupt transitions in space
and time take place in a kind of rhetorical vacuum: all is
summary, past history, exemplum.

But it is a mistake to read Frankenstein as a modern
novel of psychological realism, or as a "novel" at all. It
contains no characters, only points of view; its concerns are
pointedly moral and didactic; it makes no claims for
verisimilitude of even a poetic Wordsworthian nature. (The
Alpine landscapes are all self-consciously sublime and theatrical; Mont Blanc, for instance,
suggests "another earth, the habitations of another race of
beings.") If one were pressed to choose a literary antecedent
for Frankenstein, it might be, surprisingly, Samuel Johnson's
Rasselas, rather than a popular Gothic work like Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries
of Udolpho, which allegedly had the power to frighten its
readers. (A character in Jane
Austen's Northanger Abbey says of this once famous
novel: "I remember finishing it in two days -- my hair standing
on end the whole time.") Though Frankenstein and
Dracula are commonly linked, Bram Stoker's tour de force of
1897 is vastly different in tone, theme, and intention from Mary
Shelley's novel: its "monster" is not at all monstrous in ap-
{550} pearance, only in behavior; and he is thoroughly and
irremediably evil by nature. But no one in Frankenstein
is evil -- the universe is emptied of God and of theistic
assumptions of "good" and "evil." Hence, its modernity.

Tragedy does not arise spontaneous and unwilled in so "modern"
a setting; it must be mad -- in fact, manufactured. The Fates
are not to blame; there are no Fates, only the brash
young scientist who boasts of never having feared the
supernatural. ("In my education my father had taken the
greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no
supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled
at a tale of superstition, or to have feared the apparition of a
spirit. . . . A churchyard was to me merely the
receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the
seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm" [1.3.3.]) Where Dracula
and other conventional Gothic works are fantasies, with clear
links to fairy tales and legends, and even popular ballads,
Frankenstein has the theoretical and cautionary tone of
science fiction. It is meant to prophesy, not to entertain.

Another aspect of Frankenstein's uniqueness lies in the
curious bond between Frankenstein and his created demon. Where,
by tradition, such beings as doubles, shadow-selves, "imps of
the perverse," and classic Doppelgängers (like poor
Golyadkin's nemesis in Dostoevsky's Double [1846]) spring
full grown from supernatural origins -- that is, from
unacknowledged recesses of the human spirit -- Frankenstein's
demon is natural in origin: a manufactured nemesis. He is
an abstract idea made flesh, a Platonic essence given a
horrific (and certainly ludicrous) existence. Yet though he is
meant to be Frankenstein's ideal, a man-made miracle that would
"pour a torrent of light into our dark world" [1.3.6], he is only a fragment of
that ideal -- which is to say, a mockery, a parody, a joke. The
monsters we create by way of an advanced technological
civilization "are" ourselves as we cannot hope to see ourselves
-- incomplete, blind, blighted, and, most of all,
self-destructive. For it is the forbidden wish for death that
dominates. (In intention it is customarily the deaths of others,
"enemies"; in fact it may be our own deaths we plan.) Hence the
tradition of recognizing Faustian pacts with the devil as acts
of aggression against the human self -- the very "I" of the
rational being.

Since Frankenstein's creature is made up of parts collected
from charnel houses and graves and his creator acknowledges that
he "disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of
the human frame" [1.3.6], it
is inevitable that the creature be a profane thing. He
cannot be blessed or loved: he springs not from a natural union
but has been forged in what Frankenstein calls a "workshop of
filthy creation." One of the brilliant surrealist touches of the
narrative is that Frankenstein's shadow-self is a giant; even
the rationalization for this curious decision is ingenious. "As
the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my
speed," {551} Frankenstein explains to Walton, "I resolved,
contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic
stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and
proportionably large" [1.3.5]. A demon of mere human
size would not have been nearly so compelling.3

(The reader should keep in mind that, in 1818, the notion that
"life" might be galvanized
in laboratory conditions was really not so farfetched, for the
properties of electricity were not
commonly understood and seem to have been bound up magically
with what might be called metaphorically the "spark" of life.4 Again, in
1984, the possibility of artificially induced life, human or
otherwise, does not seem especially remote.)

Because in one sense the demon is Frankenstein's deepest self,
the relationship between them is dreamlike, fraught with
undefined emotion. Throughout the novel Frankenstein is
susceptible to fainting fits, bouts of illness and exhaustion,
and nightmares of romantic intensity -- less a fully realized
personality than a queer stunted half-self (rather like Roderick
Usher, whose sister Madeleine, his secret self, is buried
alive). It is significant that as soon as Frankenstein induces
life in his eight-foot monster, he notices for the first time
what he has created. "His limbs were in proportion,"
Frankenstein testifies, "and I had selected his features as
beautiful" [1.4.1]. But
something has clearly gone wrong:

"Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work
of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous
black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these
luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery
eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white
sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and
straight black lips."

Significant too is the fact that Frankenstein retreats from this
vision and falls asleep -- an unlikely response in naturalistic
terms but quite appropriate symbolically -- so that, shortly
afterward, his demon can arouse him from sleep:

"I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my
forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed;
when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its
way through the window-shutters, I beheld the wretch, the
miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of
the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on
me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds,
while a grin wrinkled his cheeks." [1.4.2]

"Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A
mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as
that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly
then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of
motion, it became a thing such as Dante could not have
conceived" [1.4.3].

{552} Frankenstein's superficial response to the "thing" he has
created is solely in aesthetic terms, for his atheistic morality
precludes all thoughts of transgression. (Considering that the
author of Frankenstein is a woman, a woman well
acquainted with pregnancy and childbirth at a precocious age, it
is curious that nowhere in the novel does anyone raise the issue
of the demon's "unnatural" genesis: he is a monster-son born of
Man exclusively, a parody of the Word or the Idea made Flesh.)
Ethically, Frankenstein is "blameless" -- though he is haunted
by the suspicion throughout that he has committed a crime of
some sort, with the very best of intentions.

Where the realistic novel presents characters in a more or less
coherent "field," as part of a defined society, firmly
established in time and place, romance does away with questions
of verisimilitude and plausibility altogether and deals directly
with the elements of narrative: it might be said to be an
"easier" form psychologically, since it evokes archetypal
responses on its primary level. No one expects Victor
Frankenstein to behave plausibly when he is a near-allegorical
figure; no one expects his demon to behave plausibly since he is
a demonic presence, an outsized mirror image of his creator.
When the demon warns Frankenstein (in traditional Gothic form,
incidentally), "I shall be with you on your
wedding-night" [3.3.4],
it seems only natural, granted Frankenstein's egocentricity,
that he worry about his own safety and not his bride's and that,
despite the warning, Frankenstein allows Elizabeth to be
murdered. His wish is his demon-self's command, though he never
acknowledges his complicity. Indeed, Frankenstein begins
to read as an antiromance, a merciless critique of Romantic
attitudes -- sorrow, misery, self-loathing, despair, paralysis,
etc. -- written, as it were, from the inside, by a young woman
who had already lost a baby in infancy (in 1815, a girl), would
lose another, also a girl, in 1817 [for 1818], and,
in 1819, lost a
third -- named, oddly, William (the very name of the
little boy murdered early in the narrative by Frankenstein's
demon).5
Regardless of the sufferings of others, the romantically
"self-devoted" [Walton 12]
hero responds solely in terms of his own emotions. He might be a
lyric poet of the early 1800s, for all his preoccupation with
self: everything refers tragically to him; everything is
rendered in terms of his experience:

Great God! Why did I not then expire? Why am I here to relate
the destruction of the best hope, and the purest creature of
earth? [Elizabeth] was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown
across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and
distorted features half covered by her hair. Everywhere I turn I
see the same figure, -- her bloodless arms and relaxed form
flung by the murderer on its bridal bier. Could I behold this,
and live? (Alas, life is obstinate, and clings closest where it
is most hated.) For a moment only, and I lost recollection: I
fainted. [3.6.2]

{553} Frankenstein grapples with the complex moral issues raised
by his demonic creation by "fainting" in one way or another
throughout the novel. And in his abrogation of consciousness and
responsibility, the demon naturally acts: for this is the
Word, the secret wish for destruction, made Flesh.

The cruelest act of all is performed by Frankenstein before the
very eyes of his demon: this is the sudden destruction of the
partly assembled "bride." He makes the creature at the bidding
of his demon, who has promised, most convincingly, to leave
Europe with her and to live "virtuously"; but, suddenly repulsed
by the "filthy process" [3.2.8] he has undertaken,
Frankenstein destroys his work. ("The wretch saw me destroy the
creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness,
and with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew" [3.3.2].) Afterward he thinks,
looking at the remains of the half-finished creature, that he
has almost mangled the living flesh of a human being; but
he never feels any remorse for what he has done and never
considers that, in "mangling" the flesh of his demons bride, he
is murdering the pious and rather too perfect Elizabeth, the
cousin-bride whom he professes to love. "Am I to be thought the
only criminal," the demon asks, "When all human kind sinned
against me?" [Walton 15]. He
might have said as reasonably, when all humankind conspired
in my sin.

While Paradise Lost is to Frankenstein's demon (and very
likely to Mary Shelley as well) the picture of an "omnipotent
God warring with his creatures," Frankenstein is the
picture of a finite and flawed god at war with. and eventually
overcome by, his creation. It is a parable for our time, an
enduring prophecy, a remarkably acute diagnosis of the lethal
nature of denial: denial of responsibility for one's actions,
denial of the shadow-self locked within consciousness. Even in
the debased and sensational form in which Frankenstein's monster
is known by most persons -- as a kind of retarded giant, one
might say, with electrodes in his neck -- his archetypal
significance rings true. "My form," he says eloquently, "is a
filthy type of yours." [2.7.4]

Notes

1. The influence of John Milton on
Frankenstein is so general as to figure on nearly every
page; and certainly the very conception of the monumental
Paradise Lost stands behind the conception of Mary
Shelley's "ghost story." According to Christopher Small's
excellent Ariel Like a Harpy: Shelley, Mary, and
Frankenstein (London, 1972), Mary Shelley's book list notes Paradise
Regained as read in 1815, and in 1816 she and Shelley were
both reading Paradise Lost at intervals during the year.
At one point Shelley read the long poem aloud to her, finishing
it in a week in November of 1816.

2. H. G. Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau
(1896) is a savage variant on the Frankenstein legend. Moreau
experiments on living animals, trying to make them "human" or
humanoid; he succeeds in creating a race of Beast Folk who
eventually rise up against him and kill him. Moreau's beliefs
strike a more chilling -- and more contemporary -- note than
Frankenstein's idealism: "To this day I have never troubled about
the ethics of the matter. The study of Nature makes a man at last
as remorseless as Nature," boasts Moreau.

3. In Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), the undersized and
mysteriously deformed Hyde, Jekyll's deliberately willed alter
ego, is sheer pitiless appetite, devoid of any of Frankenstein's
demon's appealing qualities. He is ugly, stunted, hateful in
appearance -- but deliberately hateful, for, much more obviously
than Frankenstein's well-spoken nemesis, he represents his
creator's violent reaction against the restraints of
civilization. Stevenson's novella is fascinating for many
reasons, one of them being Jekyll's remarkable voice when he
confesses his relationship with Hyde and the gradual usurpation
of his soul by Hyde's spirit:

The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of
Jekyll. And certainly the hate that divided them was equal on
each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He
had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared
with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir
with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which
in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he
thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not
only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that
the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the
amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and
had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again,
that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife,
closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it
mutter and felt it struggle to be born.

4. In Thomas
Hogg's Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858), Shelley's
lifelong fascination with lightning, electricity, and galvanism
is discussed at some length. As a boy he owned something called
an "electrical machine" with which he amused himself with
experiments; as a young man he was mesmerized by lightning and
thunder and made it a point to "enjoy" electrical storms.

5. The feminist critic Ellen Moers interprets
Frankenstein solely in terms of a birth myth "that was
lodged in the novelist's imagination . . . by the fact
that she was herself a mother" ("Female Gothic," Literary
Women [Garden City, N.Y., 1977], p. 140). Though her argument
certainly aids in understanding some of the less evident motives
for the composition of Frankenstein, it reduces a complex
philosophical narrative to little more than a semiconscious
fantasy, scarcely a literary work at all. Did Mary
Shelley's womb, or her brain, write Frankenstein? In
virtually a parody of feminist mythmaking, Moers argues that
Mary Shelley's book is "most powerful" where it is "most
feminine": "in the motif of revulsion against newborn life, and
the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its
consequences" (p. 142).